They want to talk about Texas, we want to talk about love...

Tuesday, cigarette #1
Over really terrible instant coffee on the front porch

Speaking of Housemate Will, this is from an email from him:

Q: Why did Douglas Hofstadter cross the road?

A: To make this joke possible.

Just finished reading all 800 pages of Metamagical Themas by Hofstadter, and I have to say that the more I read by that man (4 books now), the more I'm convinced that GEB is the least mature and least insightful of the books he's written; which is a pity since it's the most widely read. [...]

If I could boil down Hofstadter's thesis to a single sentence, it would be something along the lines of: "Modern scientists don't grok metaphors, and metaphors are the most powerful force in the universe..."

Apparently, the thing that's wrong with physicists is the same thing that's wrong with politicians. There are plenty of reasons to suspect that most important political issues of the next few decades are bound to be (for lack of a better term) matters of the spirit, either because capitalism won and we can stop rhapsodizing about the market already ("Throw the Randians down the well...") or because the future will be characterized by such material plenty that the biggest fights left will be the ones that have to do with the kinds of freedoms that materially independent people care about. That being the case, it becomes very important to have a president who is sensitive to the ways in which aesthetic and symbolic problems indicate (or constitute) real ones.

If performance studies is what you get when you apply the language of theatre & film criticism to real life, what do you get when you apply it to politics? "Aesthetic traditionalism" and "performative conservatism" both sound lame. It needs something like "rock 'n' roll conservatism," only even cooler.

More on aesthetic politics here and here. MP3 of the unnamed movement's theme song, "You Wanna Talk About Texas (I Wanna Talk About Love)" by Thurl Ravenscroft, available here.

UPDATE: A reader suggests "noir politics," which I think is equally awful from a rhetorical standpoint but which makes sense in the context of this quote from Richard Maltby:

The hero of these films, who was not always the central protagonist, was the investigator, the man assigned the task of making sense of the web of coincidence, flashback, and unexplained circumstance that comprised the plot. Uncertainly adrift in a world of treachery and shifting loyalties, the investigator of the noir movie was himself less than perfect, frequently neurotic, sometimes paranoid...

And this one from Paul Schraeder:

Because film noir was first of all a style, because it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically, because it was aware of its own identity, it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems.

Draft Andrews '08?